Should I even upgrade my base HDD?

When I buy a laptop, i'm looking for the most basic HDDs since upgrading through them costs too much. The basics range from 80GB-160GB for the most part, and they are 5400RPM.

Should I buy the WD 5000BEVT right now for when I buy my laptop so I can upgrade it?

My concern is of course, i'd be wasting money. I only use 47GB on my desktop HDD, which has XP though. I probably only need 80GB since I don't like to store too many things. In fact, I just deleted a like 1300 songs out of 1500 because I wanted to save space and plus I wasn't enjoying the music anymore.

SSD's are a good option for me but a bit too costly.

 

It really only depends on what you want to do.

If it were me, I'd want to have about 20GB free on any given drive, after OS, apps, data, and page file take up space. You need it for Windows Updates, effective disk defragging (which requires a minimum 15% free space to work best), temp files, etc.

Do you have the desire to run multiple operating systems, maybe just to fool around? Might it be nice to have a copy of your music or some of your video files on the drive? If so, an upgrade might be nice. If not, don't worry about it.

160GB is a pretty common base size these days. If it does what you want, keep it. Hard drive prices keep falling, and by the time you need a new hard drive, they'll probably be cheaper yet. In my case, I ordered a 500 gigger, but only because of a killer price ($80) and the fact that I'm multi-booting between Windows 7 RC and Windows XP. The difference in price between a 320GB drive and a 500GB one wasn't large, or I'd have gone down a step.

 

Getting the higher capacity isn't just useful for the extra space. A 500 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive will have greater performance than your forementioned 160 GB Hard Drive. (It'd be on par with a lower capacity 7200 RPM drive, while drawing less power.) The reasoning behind this is that the 500 GB Hard Drive, while spinning at the same speed, has more data condensed in a smaller amount of space, so more is being read in the same period of time.

If you want a high capacity drive, now is the time to buy. Haven't seen such a great deal on half a terabyte of space ever.

 

you could get the 250gb version of the 500gb drive if it is available.

 

The difference in price isn't significant. Why not double that for cheap? I would.

$0.0625 per GB is ridiculously cheap.

 

I know it would be better performance, although I didn't show that in my original post I suppose, but yeah, i'm wondering if that's worth it? I mean a 320GB 7200 RPM would beat the 500GB 5400 RPM for the most part, so that might be a more suitable choice.

I'm just wondering if it's worth the price though.

 

You'll be drawing in more power with a 7200 RPM drive. More power = more heat + less battery life.

The 500 GB 5400 RPM drives they have on newegg along with the coupon are amazing deals; I haven't bothered checking the 320 GB 7200 RPM models yet.

 

BTW i'm probably looking at the Lenovo T500 or Dell E6400. T500 (1000$~) if I want some graphics power, Dell E6400 if I wanted to save money (if I look hard enough, coupled with 20% coupon, I might find one in the outlet for 650$).

I don't think I'm too concerned with battery life, as either laptops have more than sufficient battery life. Heat... hmmm not really concerned either.

Also, does the T500 come with discs for it's drivers and the vista version that I buy? I know my previous E6400 did.

 

You can burn your own. They come out to 1 CD and 2 DVDs, in all it took me about 40 minutes to do the job. This way you can do a full clean installation to wipe out the recovery partitions, saving you 11-12 GB of HD Space. I'd wait till Lenovo offers the free Windows 7 upgrade for Vista Home Premium and up. I'm running Windows 7 RC1 and it's much much better than anything Vista has to offer.

In the end the decision to upgrade HD space is yours. Upgrading your hard drive has the benefit of turning your old hard drive into an external one (just get a SATA HD enclosure), that way you backup your data as well.

 

I would. Definitely. It's a great hard drive.

 

I try to buy more space than I need, because I'll eventually fill it. If you use limited space (80gb with OS) 320gb should be more than enough. For speed, get any of the newest gen 320gb or 500gb drives from seagate, wd, or hitachi. I'd probably go with the cheapeast available, pay a little more if you want to bump up to a 7200rpm.

 

In some cases that might be true. However, the 160GB drive may only need a single platter rather than two, negating that effect.

 

Could go a small 32GB SSD + hotswappable HDD via optical drive caddy/optical drive setup.